February 9, 2013

That’s the monorail track in the foreground. I’m having trouble finding out the building’s name. I think it used to be called the Plaza 600 building (600 Stewart Street, but Google is being weird; might be called the Tower Building, but the maps show that one in a different location. Hmmm.

At any rate, I worked for the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle starting in the Fall of 1985, I think. Maybe late summer. It was through a temporary agency, and I worked there a year as a temp until FHLB hired me full time. I wasn’t there very long as I only came out here for grad school, but I actually kind of enjoyed it there. I think I was there for part of the S&L crisis, and my job was in “collateral control”. FHLB would loan S&L’s, or “thrifts”, money and we took home mortgages as collateral — the actual physical mortgage documents. Of course, back then it was only a couple of pages, not the reams of paper you have today. They’d send us collateral, I’d log it in, tally up the amount, and put it in storage. I only got in trouble once, as some bank or other had sent us a list of loans that had “paid down”, and some that weren’t on the list — obviously because they hadn’t been paid down, right? — I ignored. Well, turned out those had been paid off so they were worthless. I still think that was a perfectly obvious and reasonable interpretation. Only minor trouble though.

I worked there because when I moved out here for grad school at the UW, I would have had to pay out of state tuition, which was loads more than in-state, and the only way to get in-state was to establish residency, which meant earning a living for a year. The Dept. had a rule that your acceptance was good for a year, so I just put off starting for a year and worked at FHLB. I tried staying there part time after I started school, but those first two years were just too brutal to work much. So I left, probably in early 1987 or thereabouts.